The big four distributors of food and groceries to the people of the United Kingdom are Tesco, Wal-Mart, Sainsbury and Morrison. In China Wal-Mart already has 76 stores and 30 000 employees in 28 Chinese cities although it lies some way behind the French Carrefour Group which heads the list of foreigners in China with 100 stores, 8 superstores and 90 hypermarkets. But Carrefour does not even come close to the domestic Chinese supermarket leader Hualian with 2000 stores. Tesco only arrived in China two years ago with the purchase of a stake in Hymall.

Tesco plans to build a dozen new megastores a year in China and has a large store coming onstream on Beijing’s fourth ring road. Until now foreign investment has been in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and other large eastern cities but smaller cities are now being targeted. It is not easy making sense of any of this although Wal-Mart sources 80 % of its products worldwide from China which may be part of the reasoning. At its Haidian store in north-west Beijing the Budweiser beer was made in Wuhan, the Skippy peanut butter in the Shandong and the Coca-Cola in Beijing.

In small villages...Llangolman and Purton and on the Swedish Island of Gotland...I never see the big boys. Instead I find myself shopping at Spar...a franchise providing central buying for its privately-owned small shopkeepers. But this all adds up because Spar is nowadays one of the world’s largest food retailers with an annual turnover of £20 billion. Spar was founded in the Netherlands in 1932 and has 17 000 shops in 34 countries...2600 in the UK.

Spar also has big plans for China with 120 stores opening in three Chinese provinces in the next three years, plans to open in ten more Chinese provinces by 2010 and ambitions to be the biggest retailer in China...with the encouragement of the Chinese Government which has welcomed Spar as a counterweight to the big international retailers Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco. All this is in sharp contrast to what has been going on in Cuba.

Almost five decades after Fidel Castro overthrew Fulgenicio Batista and seized power in Cuba another revolution has taken place unnoticed by the casual visitor. In the late 1980s Cuba relied on subsidies from the Soviet Union. Its agriculture was designed to produce as much sugar cane as possible which the Soviets bought at five times the market price in addition to purchasing 95 percent of Cuba’s citrus crop and three quarters of its nickel.

In exchange the Soviet Union provided Cuba with two thirds of its food imports and 90 percent of its petrol. With the implosion of the Soviet Union all these deals collapsed overnight. From the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s the daily calorie intake of the average Cuban fell from about 2500 calories a day to between 1000 and 1500.

The Cuban Government was compelled to take drastic steps to feed its people. The solution it chose was to establish a self-sustaining organic system of agriculture. Other countries in the region took the neo-liberal option but the Cubans went for food security...and a key part of their strategy was to prioritise small farmers.

Ceasing to organise its economy around the export of tropical products and the import of food it adopted a back to basics approach. With no Soviet oil for tractors it turned to oxen. With no Soviet oil for its fertiliser and pesticides it turned to natural compost and the production of natural pesticide and beneficial insects. More than 200 Biopesticide Centres produce 200 tons of Verticillium a year to control whitefly and 800 tons of Beaveria sprays to control beetles.

Cut banana stems baited with honey are placed in sweet potato fields to attract ants and have led to control of sweet potato weevil. There are 170 Vermicompost Centres, where annual production has grown from 3 to 9300 tons. Crop rotations, intercropping and soil conservation have all been incorporated into polyculture farming.

Cuba has more than 7000 urban allotments...Organoponicos...established on tiny plots of land in the centre of tower-block estates or between crumbling colonial homes that fill Havana. More than 200 gardens in Havana supply its citizens with more than 90 percent of their fruit and vegetables. One of the most successful is the Vivero Organoponico Alamar established 10 years ago and employing 25 people on a 0.7 hectare plot.

At the shop attached to the garden the hand-written blackboard lists mangoes at 2p per pound, black beans at 15p and plantains at 15p. There is a tomato shed that produced five tons in six months, a metal pyramid structure for focusing natural energy and benefiting both the plants and the gardeners, a worm farm wriggling with California Red Worms and at the end of each row of vegetables bright marigolds have been planted to attract bees and butterflies.

The economics of the Organoponicos vary. At the Metropolitana Organoponico in the city centre the land is owned by the government and everything grown there is split 50:50. At Alimar once the workers have grown their set quota of food and given it to the government the surplus is theirs to sell with the profits then divided among them.

In the past ten years calorie intake has returned to 2500 calories per day. Cuba’s infant mortality rate is lower than the US while life expectancy is the same at 77 years. This new approach is far more efficient than the previous Soviet model that stressed production at all costs...and took 10 or 15 units of energy to produce one unit of food energy.